Historical Pony: Mappy

Mappy is one of the most recognizable historical ponies. She was born in the mid to late 1970s and her parents are unknown. The black and white photo is from the 1978 book Island of Wild Horses by Jack Denton Scott. Her identification number was #50 and her registered name appears to have been Fiddle Faddle. Mappy was retired to Stan White's farm in Florida where she died in 1999. My dear friend Kathy O'Dette was one of her biggest fans and owned her 1984 colt Stormy. The second photo is one of Kathy's from 1991. Kathy got to meet Mappy in her retirement at the invitation of Mr. White in 1998. The last photo is one Kathy took of an elderly but still feisty Mappy in Florida.

Mappy was obviously a black. She had several chestnut foals so that means she carried recessive chestnut. So she would have tested as E/e.
https://www.thecolorfulchincoteague.com/black.html

She was a tobiano pinto and her most defining feature was her big cat tracks. Cat tracks are characteristic of tobiano pinto and are more common on homozygous tobianos. Homozygous tobianos have two copies of tobiano pinto and all of their foals are tobiano also. All of Mappy's foals I've seen pictures of were tobiano so it seems that she was homozygous.
https://www.thecolorfulchincoteague.com/tobiano.html
https://www.thecolorfulchincoteague.com/cattracks.html

Mappy's tobiano pinto appeared to have been affected by white suppression. You can really see it on her right side where she has a big roany C marking. It's mismatched with the big white marking on her left side like something is keeping the white away. Several of her foals were minimal pintos also.
https://www.thecolorfulchincoteague.com/minimaltobiano.html

Thanks to Kathy's pictures we can track Mappy for a large portion of her life and it doesn't appear that any of her foals were kept for the herd. Mappy was in the herd of the chestnut stallion Simon for most of her life. Some of her fellow herdmates were the previously featured historical pony Paint the Wind and Surfer Dude's dam Gremlin. After Simon died she and most of Simon's mares ended up in the herd of Broken Jaw. I hold out some hope that one of her foals we don't know of was kept for the herd.